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Nine Years Later

Photo via Slate.

How to Best Annoy a Monkey

Introduce it to a flying squirrel. (HT Tyler Cowen, by way of Andrew Sullivan.)

Articles to Read When Trapped In an Elevator

I was trapped, alone, in an elevator today. It wasn't for long: ten to fifteen minutes at most. While trying to deep-breathe my way through near panic, all I could think about was Nick Paumgarten's wonderful New Yorker article "Up and Then Down", about the history of elevators in general and Nicholas White, a man who was trapped in an elevator for 41 hours, in particular. (I have never denied being a complete dork.)

Here's a terrifying, and representative, snippet:

Still, elevator lore has its share of horrors: strandings, manglings, fires, drownings, decapitations. An estimated two hundred people were killed in elevators at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001—some probably in free-fall plunges, but many by fire, smoke, or entrapment and subsequent structural collapse. The elevator industry likes to insist that, short of airplane rammings, most accidents are the result of human error, of passengers or workers doing things they should not. Trying to run in through closing doors is asking for trouble; so is climbing up into an elevator car, or down out of one, when it is stuck between floors, or letting a piece of equipment get lodged in the brake, as happened to a service elevator at 5 Times Square, in Manhattan, four years ago, causing the counterweight to plummet (the counterweight, which aids an elevator’s rise and slows its descent, is typically forty per cent heavier than an empty car) and the elevator to shoot up, at sixty miles an hour, into the beams at the top of the shaft, killing the attendant inside. Loading up an empty elevator car with discarded Christmas trees, pressing the button for the top floor, then throwing in a match, so that by the time the car reaches the top it is ablaze with heat so intense that the alloy (called “babbitt”) connecting the cables to the car melts, and the car, a fireball now, plunges into the pit: this practice, apparently popular in New York City housing projects, is inadvisable.

On Vacation

I've been away on vacation since last week, so posting will be light (if at all). I'll be back to regular posting next week.

Just When You Thought Air Travel Restrictions Couldn't Get Any Worse

They get worse:

Although transportation officials had not announced new security measures yet, Air Canada said the Transportation Security Agency would make significant changes to the way passengers are able to move about on aircraft. During the final hour of flight, customers will have to remain seated, will not be allowed access to carry-on baggage and cannot have personal belongings or other items on their laps, according to a notice on Air Canada’s Web site.

In effect, that means passengers on flights of about 90 minutes or less will not be able to get out of their seats, since they are not allowed to move about while an airplane is climbing to its cruising altitude.

Air Canada also told its United States bound customers that they would be limited to a single carry-on item and that they would be subjected to personal and baggage searches at security check points and in the gate area. It said this would result in significant delays, canceled flights and missed connections. Air Canada said it would waive the baggage fee for the first checked bag as a result of the new policy.

At this point, walking cross country sounds more pleasant.

Season's Greetings

(Photo courtesy of Sketchy Santas.)

Mickey Mouse, Gay Basher

Jeet Heer tours the history of homosexuality in early-20th century comic strips, starting with Disney's high-pitched rodent:

What could be more wholesome than Mickey Mouse, the big-eared emblem of the Disney empire? Yet a Mickey Mouse comic strip from January 22, 1931 shows the little rodent meeting a big cat who displays all the markers stereotypically given to gay characters during that period: a lisp, a limp handshake, and a general effeminacy of manner (in this case, batting eyelashes). Revealing himself to be not just homophobic but a violent gay-basher, Mickey attacks the big cat.

Most of the comic strips Heer presents were published during the "Pansy Craze," a period in the late-twenties/early-thirties, where effeminate men and butch women were finding underground popularity.

The strips are fascinating, first for how openly homosexuality was presented in a medium like comic strips, but mostly as a reminder of how far culture (and Disney) has advanced in eighty years.

(HT Jesse Walker at Hit & Run)

Happy Birthday, Cultural Minefield!

One year old today.

Has Civilization Peaked?

My friend Seth says yes, and he's dated the peak: August 14, 2003. He hasn't convinced me yet, but his blog is singular in its focus and interesting throughout. Recommended.

Good Sentence

In fact, in the hierarchy of victimhood, young beats old, female beats male, domestic beats foreign, fur beats scales, defenseless beats well-armed, pregnant beats nonpregnant, and kittens beat everything.

From Slate.

123456

That's the most common Hotmail password, according to Wired:

A researcher who examined 10,000 Hotmail, MSN and Live.com passwords that were recently exposed online has published an analysis of the list and found that “123456″ was the most commonly used password, appearing 64 times.

Forty-two percent of the passwords used lowercase letters from “a to z”; only 6 percent mixed alpha-numeric and other characters.

Many of the top 20 passwords used were Spanish names, such as Alejandra and Alberto, suggesting that the victims were in Spanish-speaking communities. Nearly 2,000 of the passwords were only six characters long. The longest password was 30 characters — lafaroleratropezoooooooooooooo.

In-Flight Phone Use

The real reason why you have to turn off your cellphone when flying:

The Federal Communications Commission in Washington currently prohibits in-flight cellphone use on planes, partly because of some unresolved questions about the potential for interference with aircraft navigation equipment, but mostly because of phone industry concerns that airborne cell signals radiate widely, randomly contacting different ground stations. That would create interference between systems and cause logistical problems for things like billing.

From the NYT. Resistance to allowing cell phone use is still strong in the U.S., though it's becoming common overseas.

Red Sky of Sydney

Dust storms in Sydney have produced some great, and ominous, photographs. More here.

When Banter Goes Wrong

New York's WNYW anchor Ernie Anastos inadvertently chooses a very wrong word on air. The NYT reports, and you decide:

Whatever Ernie Anastos, the longtime New York television news anchor, was trying to say, it did not come out right on Wednesday night. His inadvertent use of what could literally be called a barnyard epithet made him an unintended star on the Internet all day Thursday.

In the course of one of those familiar jocular exchanges, Mr. Anastos, the co-anchor on the 10 p.m. newscast on WNYW (Channel 5), seemed to be referring to the old commercial for Perdue chicken when he suggested to the weatherman, Nick Gregory, that “it takes a tough man to make a tender forecast.”

That was not the objectionable portion of the broadcast, but it may have befuddled some viewers because Perdue has not regularly used that phrase in its advertising since 1993. But then Mr. Anastos added a suggestion for what Mr. Gregory could do with the chickens, using a term that qualifies as the sine qua no-no of live television.

Mr. Anastos’s co-anchor, Dari Alexander, looked stunned, and Mr. Gregory tried to grin through the moment. Mr. Anastos appeared not to have noticed that he had said anything wrong.

All the news that's fit to print, indeed. Hurry, call the FCC!

Hogwarts Opens in Orlando

Universal Studios is opening a Harry Potter theme park:

Three rides will form the center of the new park. Universal still will not talk much about the biggest one, a high-tech experience inside the castle called Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey that involves the likenesses of the heroes from the films.

Flight of the Hippogriff is described as a family coaster that simulates a Hippogriff (the half-horse, half-eagle beast from “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”) training flight over Hogwarts castle. Dragon Challenge is a twin high-speed coaster that will feature elements from the Triwizard Tournament.

Scratch one off the bucket list.

A Theory of Monogamy

Bryan Caplan has a theory for why monogamy breaks down:

Some people sincerely like monogamy; other people sincerely don't. Under the circumstances, it seems wise for everyone to just reveal their proclivities and pair up with people who share their expectations. Unfortunately, I don't see this happening. There is a fundamental flaw with monogamy, but it's not human nature. It's asymmetric information.

My key assumption: Most people - even most commitmentphobes - prefer a person who will be true to them. When you announce your religion, you make yourself less desirable to people who reject your religion, but more desirable to people who share it. When you announce your rejection of monogamy, in contrast, you make yourself less desirable even to people who share your rejection.

In a world of symmetric information, this wouldn't matter. People would know as much about your proclivities as you do, so there'd be no reason to pretend to be something you're not. But in the real world, no one knows your own preferences better than you do. The result: People pretend to be more monogamous than they really are.

I think his last sentence is obviously true, given the anecdotal evidence of divorces and breakups resulting from infidelity. But Caplan's theory doesn't explain the full story, for the following reasons:

"When you announce your rejection of monogamy, in contrast, you make yourself less desirable even to people who share your rejection."

Yet many people enter into "open relationships" with full knowledge on both sides. Granted, these relationships usually involve strictly-defined rules, and a breach thereof would constitute "cheating." But these rules usually limit the emotional nature of the off-relationship activities, e.g. no romantic "dates." While I think there is a strong social stigma with these types of relationships in the general population, they are not uncommon in the gay community.

"Some people sincerely like monogamy; other people sincerely don't. Under the circumstances, it seems wise for everyone to just reveal their proclivities and pair up with people who share their expectations."

I think many cheaters wouldn't necessarily be cheaters given the context of a different relationship. Hence, they don't "know" they're cheaters going into a relationship. Many individuals find they become dissatisfied with the sexual element of their current relationship, given the differing preferences of their current sexual partner. Thus, they cheat. It's not implausible to imagine this type of cheater more sexually satisfied with a partner who more closely shares their sexual preferences. Thus, they would be less likely, or unlikely, to cheat with that partner. This doesn't excuse anyone for being a cheater. I only suggest that many may not plan on cheating when entering a relationship.

"Most people - even most commitmentphobes - prefer a person who will be true to them."

Many "commitmentphobes" are such not only for the fear of losing sexual variety, but for deeper reasons concerning the emotional intimacy that comes with serious monogamous relationships. This type of commitmentphobe would still reject a serious "open relationship."

Caplan offers some solutions to this problem of asymmetric information, but I think they're also a mixed bag:

1. Increase the social sanction against concealing your type. Most obviously, we should take any outrage we feel toward "promiscuity" and redirect it toward hypocrisy.

2. Lower the social status of monogamy. As far as I can tell, this is basically Micha Ghertner's proposal. If people cared less about monogamy, there would be less incentive to pretend to be more monogamous than you really are.

3. Encourage - nay insist upon - disclosure from potential mates. With the advent of Facebook, this is far from utopian. When people announce - and update - their relationship status, for example, it's a strong and informative signal. All their friends know what they're up to - and what they've been up to. Even better, the information is just sitting there in cyberspace, so it's easy to avoid the social awkwardness of point blank questions about people's relationship history. Admittedly, it's logically possible that insisting upon disclosure would lead to a pooling equilibrium of massive deception, but it seems unlikely. Lying about yourself to isolated individuals for short-run gain is a lot less costly than lying about yourself to everyone you know, all the time.

I think his first point is already the case. The problem with cheating isn't that people don't understand how some would prefer sexual variety, but that they conceal their infidelities. It's the breach of contract that is the issue, which is, in a sense, hypocrisy. What else would you call entering into a contract you know you are going to break?

His second point is dead on. This goes back to my point about "open relationships." Without the accompanying stigma, many who sincerely don't like monogamy would enter into these types of relationships. But, as I mentioned before, even these relationships have contractual elements that can be broken, which brings us back to the problem with point one.

Point three is a bit strange. Caplan gives the example of Facebook relationship updates as a sort of "permanent record" for someone's romantic past. The problem is, these updates don't capture instances of cheating. Moreover, there is no running log of someone's "permanent record" to reference. Once the status is changed, it's changed for good.

A potential solution could be sites like this, which allow people who have been cheated on to document their former lovers as "cheaters," while also giving those entering a relationship a central location to vet their potential mates. Of course, these sites don't require proof of these indiscretions, so their reliability is dubious.

Where does that leave us? I think Caplan's second solution is the best way to overcome this information asymmetry. For instance, people like Dan Savage are already changing how some think about monogamy. Still, there's a long way to go before people accept that they can enter into a long-term relationship, especially marriage, without assuming monogamy.

Eight Years Later

How to Completely Discredit Your Cause with a Single Image

Courtesy of the World Wildlife Fund:


Caption: "The tsunami killed 100 times more people than 9/11. The planet is brutally powerful. Respect it. Preserve it."

The accompanying video can be viewed here.

WWF's response here.

God Bless America

Really, no sarcasm here. It's amazing that these parents have so little to worry about that they're irate about the Ice Cream Man. This is a luxury that doesn't get calculated by GDP.

Vicki Sell, mother of 3-year-old Katherine, tenses when the vendor starts ringing his little bell, over and over, hoping her daughter doesn’t have the typical Pavlovian response.

Ever since Katherine had an inconsolable meltdown about not being able to have a treat, Ms. Sell has been trying to have unlicensed vendors ousted from the park. She has repeatedly called the city’s 311 complaint hot line, joining parents nationwide who can’t stand the icy man or his motorized big brother, the ice cream man.

“I fall into the camp of parents who are irate,” Ms. Sell said. She has equal disdain for Mister Softee and the ice cream pop vendor outside the park, but since they are licensed, there is not much she can do about them.

“I feel kind of bad about having developed this attitude,” she said. “I want Katherine to have the full childhood experience and all. But it’s really predatory for them — two of them — to be right inside the playground like this.”

Ms. Sell says she is not obsessed with health and nutrition. She — and others — feel they have been pushed to the brink by that little bell. Across message boards and playgrounds, soccer fields and day camp exits, parents have been raging. In a greener, more health-conscious, unsafe world, the ice cream man has lost some of his mojo.